Scientists Thought Parkinson’s Was in Our Genes. It Might Be in the Water.

For decades, Parkinson’s disease has been framed as a tragic roll of the genetic dice. If it ran in your family or you carried the wrong mutation, you were “at risk.” If not, you were safe.

A growing body of research is blowing that story up.

Cases like Navy veteran Amy Lindberg, who developed Parkinson’s in her 50s after years stationed at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, are reshaping how neurologists and toxicologists think about the disease. At Lejeune, drinking water was heavily contaminated for years with industrial solvents like trichloroethylene (TCE) — and today, that historical exposure is being tied to elevated rates of Parkinson’s and other chronic illnesses.

For a company like Alpha Water & Power (AWP), this isn’t just a medical story. It’s a water-infrastructure story.

The numbers: Parkinson’s is rising faster than genetics can explain

Parkinson’s is now one of the fastest-growing neurological disorders in the world. Each year tens of thousands of Americans receive a diagnosis, and incidence has roughly doubled over the last few decades.

Yet genetics explains only a small slice of the picture. Researchers estimate that:

• Only about 10–15% of Parkinson’s cases can be fully explained by known genetic variants.
• The vast majority of patients have no clear genetic cause at all.
• Despite that, Parkinson’s rates continue to climb and are projected to increase further in the coming decades.

If a disease is mostly genetic, you don’t expect rates to spike this quickly. When they do, scientists look to the environment: the air we breathe, the chemicals we use, the food we eat — and the water we drink.

Camp Lejeune: When a water system becomes a risk factor

Camp Lejeune is one of the clearest examples of how a contaminated water system can echo through human health for decades.

From the 1950s through the 1980s, multiple wells at the Marine base were heavily contaminated with TCE and similar solvents used for degreasing equipment, dry cleaning, and other routine activities. Those chemicals seeped into groundwater and ultimately into the base’s drinking-water supply.

Years later, a large study compared Marines stationed at Camp Lejeune with those at Camp Pendleton, a similar base with uncontaminated water. The findings were stark: veterans exposed at Lejeune were significantly more likely to develop Parkinson’s than their counterparts at Pendleton.

At the same time, toxicologists in animal models have shown that long-term, low-level TCE exposure can damage the same dopamine-producing neurons in the brain that are destroyed in Parkinson’s disease. In other words, we now have both:

• Epidemiological evidence — higher Parkinson’s rates in populations exposed to TCE-contaminated water.
• Biological evidence — a plausible mechanism for how that exposure injures the brain.

That combination is exactly what regulators and public-health agencies look for when deciding a chemical is a serious hazard. It’s also why, after years of pressure, regulators are finally moving to restrict or phase out TCE.

Beyond TCE: Parkinson’s and a wider chemical landscape

TCE is just one compound. Other chemicals that touch water, wastewater, and land use are under similar scrutiny:

• Pesticides and herbicides used in agriculture and landscaping, some of which have been repeatedly linked to elevated Parkinson’s risk in farmworkers and people living near heavily sprayed fields.
• Other chlorinated solvents used in degreasing, metal finishing, and dry cleaning, which can migrate into groundwater or volatilize into indoor air through “vapor intrusion.”
• Persistent “forever chemicals” like PFAS, which are now being tied to hormonal, immune, and metabolic impacts and are notoriously difficult to remove once they enter a watershed.

The uncomfortable reality is that many of these compounds ultimately funnel through water systems: into rivers and aquifers, through stormwater and wastewater, and sometimes back into drinking water via reuse or poorly controlled discharge.

For water and wastewater operators, that makes Parkinson’s — and other chronic diseases linked to environmental exposure — an infrastructure problem, not just a clinical one.

Why this is a water story (not just a neurology story)

There are a few hard truths that communities, utilities, and regulators are being forced to confront:

1. Disease often appears decades after exposure

Solvents like TCE can linger in groundwater for years, even after releases stop. Parkinson’s symptoms typically emerge after a decade or more of slow neuron loss. That means the patients neurologists are seeing today may be living with the consequences of water-quality decisions made in the 1980s and 1990s.

2. Regulatory compliance is not the same as health protection

For years, many communities were “in compliance” while still carrying measurable levels of compounds that are now under intense scrutiny. PFAS is the most visible example today, but TCE and related solvents followed a similar path: widely used, lightly regulated, and only later recognized as serious long-term threats.

3. Infrastructure choices are health choices

Decisions about source protection, industrial permitting, groundwater cleanup, and treatment technology directly shape chronic disease risk in a community — even if the connection only becomes visible decades later.

If you plan, finance, or operate water and energy infrastructure, that’s the new reality: your system is part of the neurological and metabolic health story of your service area.

The exposome: from “what’s in the genes?” to “what’s in the pipes?”

An emerging field called exposomics is trying to quantify a simple idea: your lifetime health is shaped not just by your DNA, but by the total sum of environmental exposures you accumulate from the womb to old age.

For the water sector, exposomics is both a warning and an opportunity:

• It highlights how low-level, chronic exposures — the kind that often slip under traditional toxicology thresholds — can add up over time.
• It pushes us to prioritize the mixtures that matter most, instead of playing “whack-a-mole” with one contaminant at a time.

Just as the Human Genome Project mapped our genetic code, researchers are now imagining a “Human Exposome Project” to map the chemical and physical exposures that drive disease. That work will ultimately feed back into how we design, monitor, and upgrade water systems.

What this means for utilities, cities, and infrastructure investors

So what does all of this look like in practice for the water and infrastructure world AWP lives in?

1. “Unregulated” does not mean “irrelevant”

Many of the chemicals now tied to Parkinson’s and other chronic diseases were widely used and poorly controlled long before they appeared on regulatory lists. Waiting for a compound to make it onto a formal schedule often means waiting until after the damage is done.

Forward-leaning utilities and industrial owners are starting to:

• Add solvents, VOCs, and pesticides to monitoring programs even before regulation mandates it.
• Track PFAS and other persistent pollutants at extremely low levels to understand local baselines and hotspots.

2. Invest in advanced, flexible treatment trains

The old model — design once around a narrow list of legacy contaminants — is giving way to more agile treatment architectures, including:

• Activated carbon and ion-exchange systems for PFAS and many organic contaminants.
• Advanced oxidation and membranes (UV-AOP, RO, nanofiltration) to tackle a wider spectrum of compounds.
• Smart sensor networks and analytics to detect anomalies and track contaminant fingerprints over time.

These are capital decisions, but they’re also risk-management decisions. As regulation and public awareness catch up, systems that invested early in multi-contaminant control will be better positioned.

3. Pair source control with treatment

Camp Lejeune is the cautionary tale: no treatment plant can fully compensate for uncontrolled industrial releases into a local aquifer.

Water-smart cities and industrial campuses are increasingly:

• Tightening industrial pretreatment and discharge permits for high-risk chemistries.
• Protecting wellhead and recharge zones from the most hazardous uses.
• Pairing onsite reuse with stricter controls on what enters those loops in the first place.

4. Connect water data with health data — carefully

You can’t manage what you don’t measure. As exposomics matures, communities will have new tools to overlay contaminant maps with anonymized health data to spot hotspots early and prioritize cleanup.

Handled poorly, that creates liability. Handled well, it becomes a powerful way to make smarter, earlier investments in remediation and prevention.

What communities and customers can do now

Most individuals can’t rewrite national chemical policy on their own. But there are practical steps that align with the emerging science and complement what utilities do:

• Know your water. Review your local water-quality reports, especially any testing for solvents, pesticides, and PFAS.
• Use certified point-of-use filtration where it makes sense, particularly for private wells or in areas with known contamination.
• Support source-reduction policies. Phase-outs of high-risk chemicals are fundamentally public-health decisions that also protect water systems.
• Back infrastructure upgrades. Bond measures and rate cases that fund advanced treatment and remediation are investments in long-term neurological and metabolic health, not just “pipe replacement.”

AWP’s perspective: from treating patients to treating water

The evolving science around Parkinson’s is pointing toward a larger shift.

For the last century, we built a health system that waits for people to get sick and then deploys sophisticated medicine to manage symptoms. The new science of environmental disease is telling us that’s not enough. We also need sophisticated infrastructure — water, wastewater, and energy systems designed from the ground up to minimize chronic exposure to chemicals that never should have lingered in our environment.

At Alpha Water & Power, we see three core imperatives:

• Treat legacy plumes and “mystery” solvents as front-line health issues, not distant environmental problems.
• Design industrial and data-center water systems that are closed-loop, tightly monitored, and chemically transparent.
• Give communities, regulators, and investors better visibility into exposure risk, not just compliance checkboxes.

Genes still matter. But as the Parkinson’s research community is increasingly telling us, pipes, plumes, and policy may matter more than we ever realized. If we take that seriously in how we design and operate our water systems, Parkinson’s won’t be the only disease that turns out to be far more preventable than we once thought.